Thursday, October 31, 2013

he knows us allhell crawls through the windowwithout a soundenters my roomtakes off his hatand sits down on the couch across from me.I laugh.then my lamp drops off the table,I catch it just before it hits thefloor, and in doing so,I spill mybeer. "oh shit!" I say;when I look up againthe son-of-a-bitchis gone–off looking for you,my friend?

Altman Siegel is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Jessica Dickinson. This is the New York based painter's first exhibition with the gallery and in San Francisco.

The exhibition consists of three paintings accompanied by large works on paper. Dickinson's abstract paintings are layered over an extended period of time through repeated additive and subtractive procedures with oil on a plaster like surface. Events of marking, scraping, covering, cutting into and revealing are compressed as the paintings unfold actions of chance, change, and intention over time. The mixed media works on paper offer contrast through their differing material processes, incorporating the index of time, pressure, and marks formed beneath and between the peripheral activities of making the paintings. Dickinson's decelerated works have the feeling of exposed surfaces moving through different states, where matter asserts itself as something impenetrable while at the same time vulnerable.

This exhibition is titled 'Of-', expressing the relationship between parts, understanding that nothing can be fully seen or known at once. This speaks of the connections between the works, but also the process of looking at each piece individually as they shift according to distance, closeness, and oblique angles. Oscillating between atmosphere and hard matter, the works follow sensations of an unfolding thought process examining an idea, emotion, or situation in it's various conflicting dimensions over time. Moving through the works is the sense of a space that alters between being an obstruction, veil, threshold or opening. These works present the residue of past marks, decisions, and attempts at breaching the surface, while at the same time beginning to delineate the present and future. The title 'Of-' also lets the works rest in states of being "of" something - of physical matter, of subject, of vision, of process, of time - never a whole in itself but "connected with, taken from, made from, relating to, affected by".